At the Community Action Program (CAP) I work for, we have 8 different departments which all deal with clients independently.

Our clients are those on or below the poverty line, our mission is to enable them to get out of poverty and thus break that cycle.

Due to this, quite often a client being seen by one dept. is qualified for another form of assistance but since there is no central database, it is difficult for that client to identify which dept. are able to help them except for the one they are in contact with now.

any ideas of databases that are around that information such as:

age, income, family stats and so on can be entered in then compared by the qualifying requirements of each dept.

It is our hope that when a new client is entered into the database, their details are inputted and the database shows they are able to apply for

Section 8 housing, weatherization, Energy assistance but do not qualify for Head start, Individual Development account and so on.

Initially I don't see too many staff accessing but we do have 100+ staff, at least 1/2 of those would use it once it is established.

My thoughts would be to setup an SQL style d'base because i don't want the hassle of setting up a new database to find in 8-12 months time its not able to handle the workload.

I really don't know if the boss will fork out the $$ to have a custom one built from scratch, and if there is one that can be adjusted & fine tuned to our needs, perhaps this isn't needed.

We are always having our requirements for reports by the state/fed Govt changed just before the reports are due, so we are hoping something like this would allow us to have all the info in it, if a change to the report structure is demanded by our funding source, we can adjust the report request query and not have to troll through 16million pages every 2nd year.

An Access front end with an SQL database may do nicely and is likely to be the least difficult and cheapest to develop. However maintaining an Access front-end for 50-100 users could be a bit troublesome and a web based front-end may be easier in the long run.

Also you may find that when you get down to the detail of what you need that it is more intricate and complex than expected, so I would reccomend that you first establish a detailed requirements list / specification. Depending on what you find, other solutions may be more appropriate.

Are there other CAP's around that have similar requirements? Maybe others have already developed a solution or would be willing to share cost?